Searching for the appropriate literary material for his film Askol'dov read a short story "In the City of
Berdichev" by Vasilii Grossman (Iosif Solomonovich Grossman, 1905-1964), and decided to base his film Commissar on this story.
from
Berdichev, for example, recalls that her high-school boyfriend's Ukrainian family suggested hiding her in their cellar until things "calmed down" after the Germans came and established their rule.
Vasili Grossman nacio el 12 de diciembre de 1905 en
Berdichev, Ucrania, de padres judios que se separaron al poco de nacer el.
Like Conrad's birthplace Berdychiv (Pol: Berdiczow; Rus:
Berdichev), which was in 1857 part of Russia's Empire, Kovel was in pre-partition Poland's eastern borderland, today's western Ukraine.
(24) The scale of the operation was so huge that, for instance, in
Berdichev, 60% of Poles living there were arrested by June 1938.
Yet near the end of his book, while visiting an ancestral home in Odessa, he decides to skip the journey to
Berdichev, a shtetl in eastern Ukraine where the saga began: "I want to see what the sky looks like in
Berdichev, but I have to go home." The book closes with this evasion, for de Waal has lost himself in nostalgia; nothing about a shtetl will be "worldly," one of his favoured adjectives.
If only Viktor had allowed his mother to come and live with him, she would have survived; but his wife, Lyudmila, didn't get along with Anna, so she remained in
Berdichev and died.
Levi Isaac of
Berdichev, indicates that the Tzaddiqim, "now have the power to interpret the Torah in the way they like" (23) even if in heaven this interpretation is not accepted.